Antonio García Martínez says much of what I would, We are no longer a serious people – When reality suddenly becomes non-optional. Read the whole thing as they say.
I will mention that Antonio recorded a podcast for my Substack. I will post it in the next few weeks at some point.
America is the world’s most innovative and wealthy nation. But there’s a hollowness about us right now we need to acknowledge.
Though I agree about the present unseriousness of the American people as explained by Martinez, I suspect (though I could be wrong, he talks more about the US than about Afg) he succumbs to the same “inevitability” and “graveyard of empires” fallacies that everybody seems to be subscribing to.
The reality is that the US never even tried to fix Afghanistan. It was just a perennial (though in the background) prop in the War on Terror, and they scrammed when it lost its purpose. There are several tangible reasons that explain the recent events. See the following two articles (both make quite similar points):
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-biggest-american-fuck-ups-that-screwed-afghanistan?ref=author
https://www.sarahchayes.org/post/the-ides-of-august
Afghanistan has not been reconquered by a ragtag bunch of fanatic guerillas because the public there seeks this kind of rule or their soldiers were too chicken to fight. Afghanistan has been conquered by a neighboring country with nuclear weapons, backed monetarily and militarily by a bigger neighboring country, also with nuclear weapons and hegemonic ambitions (y’all know which countries I’m talking about.)
But none of this is going to be ever be mentioned in American news channels, because every faction from right to left prefers to use these events to gain political mileage. Unseriousness!
Is having an opinion of Afghanistan a mark of seriousness? I think if you’re serious its hard to be confident on, like all serious problems. Some of the most serious people might talk about trivialities for this reason.
Still, the only (unserious, trivial) thought I have to offer right now is that the rhetoric around “women and girls” and staying to enforce cultural change over time shows how far the shift has been since the invasion towards bipartisanship (at least a bipartisanship within certain factions) of the impulse towards the “civilizing mission”. There is a degree to which the strategic case isn’t really made, just “We’re there, and whether that was right or not, its low cost to stay there, so let’s remain for the good of the Afghans, for the sake of positive cultural change” (with claims to agnosticism on cultural values and cultural neutrality forgotten, if the speaker ever held claimed to have held them).
But that “mission” seems to me obviously ineffective. Compare the years of schooling of women of reproductive age, in OurWorldInData’s UN sourced data – https://tinyurl.com/y27ct29u . Afghanistan’s neighbours, Pakistan and Iran, moved further on that point that Afghanistan. It doesn’t seem to me particularly persuasive that the United States (and Great Britain and other allies) were even more effective on this cultural change, than might be expected in a counterfactual where the US simply dealt with the Al-Qaeda problem and then left Afghanistan to be a buffer state between Iran and Pakistan (which is where it seems like it will revert to). It would even be plausible to me that the Iranians might be have been more persuasive to Afghans on making the case for the compatibility of Islam and educated daughters.
Neither was the coalition of the West impressive on transforming GDP per capita (https://tinyurl.com/45yamzv4) or look at life expectancy (https://tinyurl.com/7jhc2xyk), which improves yes, but doesn’t break trend.
So even to the very questionable extent we accept this mission of civilizing mission, the gains are meagre. What Afghanistan seems to stand for then, in the minds of some, is not even an actual civilizing mission (where great changed can be demonstrated) but the notion of one, imbued with either “Progressive Values” or “National Greatness and Prestige” depending on the speaker (if I force myself to at least appear to be even-handed between those two options). That’s perhaps what I could say is one of the fundamentally “unserious” parts of this conversation.
Matt,
Afghanistan until the 1970s functioned much better than many countries today that Americans would never consider invading or trying to “civilize”. Afghanistan was broken by the US Cold War apparatus in the 80s. Sure, the Soviets were the initial culprits, but the US flooded the country in arms and jihadist propaganda (which came back to bite) and gave lots of money to the Pakistani establishment to start their own version of Jihad Inc. (and become a nuclear power to boot). So do Americans not bear any responsibility for at least trying to fix that godforsaken land?
There are tangible reasons why countries break, and tangible ways in which they can be fixed (though it requires a lot of work and commitment). All this talk about civilizing missions is mental masturbation. And doing a cost/benefit analysis as a reason to scram is simply a cop out, a way of evading responsibility while sounding high-minded.
No, they do not, and any talk to the contrary is a masturbatory self-indulgent imaginary playing of the game Risk. They didn’t do the slightest thing in twenty years. You assert this is because they did not try hard enough, no thanks to that.
It’s not an assertion but a fact. Bush and his team got bored of Afghanistan literally months after 9/11 and pivoted towards Iraq. Afghanistan almost went out of the news for several years after that.
And it’s not about trying “hard enough”. It’s about doing a few key things right, but one has to be bothered to do so in the first place.
But then the average American is allergic to knowing (or finding out) anything about foreign countries, at least those outside the West, so nothing better could have been expected.
Will repeat that the US bore responsibility for breaking Afghanistan during the 80s, as any sentient person who can read that period’s history will agree to.
Guise, c’mon. 19 Hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. 4 Israelis were set up in Hoboken prior to and filmed the event. Building 7 wasn’t hit by a plane and free fell into its own footprint. All of this was on “the news.” We are not serious because we let these clowns loot and murder wherever they want with zero accountability, believing the horsesh!t they explain about their activities from the institutions they control. All you have to do is see what is right in front of you, and you know, get angry. Frustrating I know but the time is well past for ennui.
If the modern US was never capable of doing the right thing in Afghanistan, how was the occupation ever supposed to make things right? It’s like letting a bull back into the china shop so that he can put things back together. Surprise, that’s not what’s going to happen.
There are tangible reasons why countries break, and tangible ways in which they can be fixed (though it requires a lot of work and commitment). All this talk about civilizing missions is mental masturbation.
@Numinous — Those two sentences seem contradictory.
Pseudoerasmus considers the counterfactual of the US not intervening after the Soviet invasion. A lot of the civil war still follows, though who is to say what would have happened afterward:
https://twitter.com/pseudoerasmus/status/1427338870904049673
@Roger Sweeny:
I was trying to say that the term “civilizing mission” abstracts the tasks that had to be done in Afg to a 10000 feet level. And I don’t agree that should have ever been the mission. Afg is and was a civilized country; it’s just a kind of civilization that is radically different from that in Western countries, and in many respects abhorrent to Westerners (and to us Hindus too.)
The goal should have been: how do we get a government in place that can muster up and maintain the loyalties of its citizens at a level where no further foreign assistance would be needed. Also, how to install institutions and infrastructure that would make a significant chunk of the population (even if it be a minority) fear the resurgence of the Taliban so much that they would resist it successfully. These tasks could have been performed within the “rules” of Afg civilization (i.e., their existing political and social structures), but it required a higher attention span than Americans were willing to give.
All-in-all, I’ll say now that the pullout was the right thing to do, because the Americans in charge were completely unwilling and possibly incapable of learning and doing the right things, so what was the point in staying there? I’d encourage you to check out the latest Brown Pundits podcast, where Omar makes a cogent argument for this.
Add “deal with Pakistan” to my above comment. It’s sort of a given in my mind, but I think Americans mistakenly think about Afg in isolation.
@Numinous — Thanks for the clarification. Now off to Brown Pundits.
At the moment, I’m not sure there was any way to “fix” Afghanistan, given the pre-2001 history and the presence of the Taliban, any more than I am sure there was a way to “fix” South Vietnam in the ’60s.
To be clear, when I mentioned the term “civilizing mission”, this was not an endorsement that this was actually a good framework to use (something I would have hoped was clear from the derision of the people to whom I imputed the holding of this concept).
As to trying to somehow engineer a situation in which “a significant chunk of the population (even if it be a minority) fear the resurgence of the Taliban”, in terms of the personal consequences to them, more than they actually already do in the quite bad situation they’re already in… beyond the question of how you would do that, and whether it would have the consequences of simply creating more refugee pressure in the end, that seems fairly evil. To create a setup where people would have more fear of harm to themselves, in order to ultimately serve a Machiavellian ends of make them fight for a state you’ve created. I don’t think it’s boredom that would keep the US from doing such. At least hopefully that wouldn’t be the only constraint.
(Not that the Americans were even the only parties in Afghanistan – what happened to ‘the Coalition’ and the UN here? What happened to anyone raising the supposedly obviously strategy at least mid way through the last 20 years, before its pure Captain Hindsight time?)